While the reduction of power consumption has long been a goal in the design of semiconductor devices, more recently the expansion of mobile computing/electronics has increased the attention paid to this goal. For systems comprised of discrete components mounted to a printed circuit board (PCB), power consumption is reducible by operating different components at different voltage levels and/or frequencies. For a system-on-chip (SoC), power islands (or voltage islands) are used as a technique for reducing power consumption, where the power islands represent corresponding power domains, some or all of which operate at different voltage levels and/or frequencies.